Intertextuality, Plausibility, and Interpretation

Histos ()

Copyright Christopher Pelling March

INTERTEXTUALITY, PLAUSIBILITY,

AND INTERPRETATION*

Abstract: Are there differences in principle between intertextuality in historiography and in other genres? This paper explores that question with detailed analysis of three cases,

Herodotus account of Marathon, Xenophons of the seizure of the Cadmeia, and Plu-

tarchs of the final days of Julius Caesar. Particular attention is paid to the value of inter-

textuality for interpretation, as echoes of classic models prompts reflection both on his-

torical continuities and on changes. Any generic differences may be in terms of the dif-

ferent ways in which readers may care about real life experiences and those in fiction; it

may also be that interpretations of other genres may apply, in a filtered way, the same

reading techniques that historiography encourages for its real-life narratives.

I

ife is not a narrative fiction; but we often try to make sense of it by

treating it as if it were. We tell stories about our own and others past,

present, and future which impose order on the messiness of reality,

and we select what fits certain narrative templates of plot or character or

moral import: the debonair chancer who will come to no good, the quiet

man who should not be ignored, the talented woman whos in danger of hit-

ting that glass ceiling. One influential (and admittedly controversial) school

of psychotherapy works on our own narratives that we tell about ourselves,

which are not always the most generous or even the fairest: think of what a

hard time Aeneas gives himself and his colleagues for the enterprising switch

of armour in Aeneid , when an equivalent plot-line plays out marvellously

and successfully with switches of uniforms in many a World War II film.

There is evidence too that juries are more likely to accept narratives if they

map on to familiar patterns that they know from fiction, more usually these

days from television drama than from the Iliad. Alan Dershowitz once man-

aged to save someone from what looked like a cut-and-dried prosecution

casehis client had taken out a big insurance policy on his wife, then she

died mysteriously and violently a week laterby arguing precisely that life

* The purpose of this paper was to prepare for and contribute to discussion in the

APA panel, and it is published now in case anyone finds it useful for the continuation of

that debate. I have thought it best to keep the feeling of immediacy by not changing ref-

erences that were appropriate at the time, whether to current politics or to the state of

scholarly discussion. Virg. Aen. ..

L

Christopher Pelling

is not a dramatic narrative: what could never be coincidence if it were on

the screen (Double Indemnity) might be exactly that in the untidy and un-

shaped realities of life. That story is as telling for what Dershowitz needed to

argue against, the natural assumptions that a jury would bring to such a

case, as for the defamiliarising rhetorical technique that he got away with

using. Whatever else we say about the value of intertextuality in historical

narrative, we should not lose sight of that simple truth: a narrative is simply

more plausible if it already maps on to a pattern that its audience finds famil-

iar, if the fighting in the Great Harbour at Syracuse echoes that in the straits

of Salamis or if Cleon has something of the Thersites about him. Such

things happen and such people happen; this is the way they happened be-

fore; why be surprised if they happen again?

Naturally enough, we apply similar narrative codes in making sense of

politics or economics, often more or less consciously appealing to patterns

familiar from our reading of or memories of the past. There is always a dan-

ger of a double dip in a recession; there will always be an ideological dimen-

sion to Conservative cutting of public expenditure, remember Thatcher

they all love doing it for its own sake; over-high expectations are always a

problem for an incoming President; trouble always comes if you spend

money on anything that a Founding Father wouldnt have popped down to

the local shop and bought himself. Indeed, one school of historiographic

theorising develops this insight in exploring the different ways that causal

analysis works in science and in history. In science the whole point of claim-

ing a causal relationship is to claim that if the preconditions were repeated

the same result would ensue; but it is hard to believe that, even if per impossi-

bile exactly the same circumstances were to obtain again as in , the So-

viet empire would collapse in exactly the same way, any more than exactly

the same football match would always take place if the players took up the

same initial positions with the same coaching instructions in the same pitch

and weather conditions. One can still offer causal explanations in retrospect,

but once againso this school would suggestthis may be more a matter of

applying familiar narrative codes, picking out from the conglomerate of con-

fusing details the elements that fit a pattern. One can see the force of that

argument without necessarily thinking that that procedure is wholly arbi-

Dershowitz () .

Cf. respectively Rood () , stressing that the memory of the Persian Wars

suggests points of contrast as well as points of comparison (), which fits my argument

below); Cairns (). On this contrast of scientific and historical explanation cf. esp. Mink (). Analysis

of the various tropes of historical narrative is of course particularly associated with the

work of Hayden White, esp. White () and ().

Intertextuality, Plausibility, and Interpretation

trary or fictional. We can be identifying patterns in the events as well as in

our own minds, and not every interpretation or selection is as good as every

other (think of the Founding Father and the local shop): departments of His-

tory and Political Science need not be built on a principle of massive fraud.

So: stories build on other stories; writers and readers apply familiar

codes in order to make sense of what they say and what they read. This is

highly relevant as we turn to consider how historiographic intertextuality is

different in kind from any other sort of intertextuality. That question has

been addressed in the last year both by David Levene and by Cynthia

Damon; there could scarcely be a hotter topic for discussion.

II

One central point must be that historiography deals with events that really

happened and (presumably) tries to get them right, within the historians

and audiences terms of reference for whatever getting them right may

mean. Damon stresses the difficulty of distinguishing allusions to earlier nar-

ratives from allusions to the events themselves that those narratives de-

scribed, and that must be correct as well: for later authors, to allude to the

Persian Wars must be to allude also to Herodotus, and to allude to the Pelo-

ponnesian Wars also to Thucydidesindeed, if I was right in arguing (also

within the last twelve months) that Plutarchs or Dionysius echoes summon

up the whole world of Thucydidean civil war, with its brutality and its self-

seeking and its imperialistic overstretch, it would be almost impossible to al-

lude to the Peloponnesian War without making it also, distinctively, Thucy-

dides Peloponnesian War. Levene stresses that [i]n practice events in real

life may show striking resemblances to other historical events, and people in

real life may deliberately choose to model their behaviour or public image

on earlier figures; the second point is made by Damon as well.

Yet, as

Levene () ; Damon (). As Damon says of her own paper (), almost

everything that follows is exempli gratiathe same story could be told with other exam-ples: the next few pages draw on cases which I have analysed more fully elsewhere, and I

apologise for that. At least the discussion can therefore be briefer than it would otherwise

be. Damon herself puts it the other way round, and that also has force: Is it even possi-

ble, when alluding to a text narrating historical events, to keep the events themselves

from drowning out the text? (p. ). But drowning out there seems to me too strong;

that depends on the text, and Thucydides or Tacitus would take a lot of drowning out

Homer even more so. Pelling ()

Levene () .

Christopher Pelling

Levene also says, there is not a complete gulf here between historiography

and other genres, prose or verse, and this is true in several ways. It is even

more difficult to suggest the Trojan War without suggesting Homer than to

suggest the Peloponnesian War without suggesting Thucydides. A Stend-

halian or Dostoyevskian novelistic hero may also model himself on earlier

real-life figures, perhaps Napoleonic or anarchist ones, and here too the

presentation depends on an audiences precognition of the types, and to an

extent of the history. If Demosthenes attacks Philip in oratorical terms that

unmistakably recall Xerxes or casts himself in a Periclean mode, that point

has features in common with the ways in which Books and of Thucy-

dides recall both, intertextually, the Persian invasion and, intratextually, the

Periclean model. And different novels, epics, or dramas in completely inde-

pendent traditions can also describe similar sequences, presumably because

they too are secondarily dependent on the ways that life-patterns can repeat.

Still, I agree that there remains a difference of some sort here, though it

may depend less on how the intertextuality works, more on what readers

may typically do with it: less what it is than what it is for. The boldly tradi-

tional can put that in terms of authorial project, what an author said or

thought it was for; the more cautious can deal in terms of reader response,

the sort of use which a readerconstructed reader, real reader, or both

would be invited by the text to make, and the meaning that would be duly

created at the point of reception.

So what is it for? Is it for plausibility, the point I have already men-

tioned? Yet a lover who gives all for love, a tart with a heart, a gum-chewing

or beer-swilling detective at odds with his superior, a high-living and big-

spending football star may also all become more credible figures in their re-

spective genres if they fit a familiar pattern, just as a threatening tyrant, an

over-reaching invader, or a masterful statesman does in oratory or historiog-

raphy. The same goes for the narrative codes with which we would associate

each one of those types: what would really be an innovative novel would be

one where it was the detectives superior, insisting on the virtues of method

and distrusting flair, who nailed the murderer. Perhaps we may care about

Damon () .

I am of course aware that here I am tripping blithely through a theoretical mine-

field, and that no textone may saycan ever command its readers what to do with it;

they can use it as a dartboard or to set unseens if they like. But this may raise a further

question: might here too historiography work in distinctive ways, with a historian using

all the techniques that John Marincola () has explored to build an authority that is

more directive to readers than is typical in some other genres? That is far from meaning

that historiography generates closed rather than open texts, insisting on single clear-cut

answers; but it may at least set a reading agenda of the interpretative issues that a narra-

tive raises. That is a big issue, but can perhaps here be left as separate.


the plausibility in a different way, just as we care about keeping a line be-

tween fact and fiction, whatever the familiar narrative codes that come into

play, in saying whether it was really the British or the Americans who

cracked the Enigma code (must be the ones or the others because, in this

genre, it always is) or whether there really were, or at least were really

thought to be, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Perhaps this comes

down to saying no more than that we care about history, at least recent his-

tory, not necessarily more than but in different ways from those in which we

care about plays or novels. That is not an earth-shattering revelation, but it

is surely true.

Or perhaps we should concentrate less on plausibility than on interpre-

tation: we look at events in different ways if we think that the intertextual

suggestions are capturing a recurrence of events, not just of story-telling

tropes. Damon brings out the way that Tacitus account of CE so of-

ten suggests parallels with the earlier civil war of years earlier, parallels

of whichTacitus brings outobservers and participants at the time were

also aware: the past and the present are of a piece the historian, like his

internal audience in , sees the same thing over and over again. If so,

one asks oneself why: is it something deeply embedded in human, or at least

Roman, nature? Is it because the agents themselves were too blinded to

learn from past examples, as Damon says Galba should have learned from

the precedent of Julius Caesar of the dangers that threatened on the day of

his death? If the accessions of Tacitus Tiberius and then of his Nero evoke

not merely each other but also that of Livys Servius Tullius (.), does that

too tell us about something of the pathology of one-man rule?

Yet once again there are analogies in other genres. If arrival in Latium is

going to produce the Trojan War all over again (Aen. ., .), one

can again ask why; more challengingly, one can also ask why Turnus, origi-

nally cast as Achilles (.), ends by playing Hector to Aeneas Achilles in

the typology of Book ; and we might draw conclusions about the nature of

civil warfare or of humanity that are not so distant from those we might

Damon (), (quotations from ).

Damon (), : Galba should have known better, .

Cf. esp. Martin () and Goodyear () on Tac. Ann. .. Goodyear remarks

( n. ), If T. intended an allusion to Tanaquil to be recognized, it is hard to see what

he hoped to gain by it, since as Charlesworth says [CR (), ], Tanaquil is usu-

ally represented as a type of female virtue, rather than anything like the sinister figure T.

makes out Livia to be. But (a) Livys Tanaquil is not exactly a figure of exemplary virtue

and (b), even if she were, it would be more telling, not less, if women at very different lev-

els on the virtue scale found themselves replaying a similar role: that makes it less a point

about villainy, more about the transitions of power.

Christopher Pelling

draw from historiography. That is even truer if we wonder what to make of

the Aeneid s resonance of the recent past, with another socer and gener brought

to combat: here too the same things may come back, and it would be a crass

reader who failed to recognise the capacity of imaginative fiction to draw

on, and suggest insights into, real-life experience. But the more immediate

and obvious ways in which historiography narrates reality does mean that

any interpretations bite on real human experience in a more direct way.

Perhaps, indeed, the Aeneid s own purchase on its readers recent experi-

ence is in a way parasitic on historiographys techniques: what happened in

the distant past can illuminate more recent history and vice versa just as if

those distant events had really happened in that way.

III

Not all interpretative inferences or ponderings need be so weighty. If Ap-

pian evokes the Great Battle in the Harbour in describing Naulochus or

Plutarch evokes both Salamis and Syracuse in describing Actium, it not

only aids the plausibility of the account (above, p. ); it also helps us to un-

derstand the tactics that were employed, and how they could be successful.

If we sense Xenophons Anabasis in the background of Antonys retreat from

Parthia, that economically conveys the massiveness of the perils and hard-

ships that Antony faced: it is a sort of shorthand, in fact, exploiting the

knowingness of the readerand incidentally short enough a shorthand to

suggest that we should not here think of artistic aemulatio, rich though that

approach often is in treating later imitatio of classic texts. Such allusions are

simply too brief and undeveloped to offer any competition at all to the great

texts themselves.

As Damon comes close to suggesting in her final sentences, p. .This in that

way is important: I accept that many, not perhaps all, of Virgils audience would have

been prepared to accept that Aeneas and Turnus were historical characters, just as more

certainly Homeric readers would have thought Agamemnon and Achilles were historical.

It is more difficult to think that readers would have felt that details of the fighting in Ae-

neid were reliable; that would require a belief in the Muses inspirational powers that is

easier to believe for Homer. Appian BC .. with Gowing () n. : see also Pelling () .

Plut. Ant. with the notes in my commentary (Cambridge, ) on . (back-

ing water), . (how smaller ships can defeat bigger ships), and . (a sea-battle that

is like a land-battle). Plut. Ant. , again with my commentary, esp. the introductory n. (p. ) and

those on ., ., . and ..

Or so I argued in, once again, Pelling () .


The Parthian example is interesting in other ways too, as this is one of

those cases where the participant is very aware of the intertext (Plut. Ant.

.):

Antony, so the story goes, often exclaimed, O, the Ten Thousand!

This was to show his admiration for Xenophons army, which made

an even longer march from Babylon to the sea and succeeded in forc-

ing its way through to safety against even stronger opposition.

Two separate points here look forward to the themes of the second part

of the paper. First is one stressed by both Levene and Damon, the way that

intertextuality often points to a role consciously played by a character in the

text: Antony here knows that he is playing Xenophon, even though at that

point he does not yet know if he will get away with it. Second is the way that

intertextuality is often most interesting when it underlines differences as

much as similarities, or differences within similarities: it is not quite the same

thing coming back, but a modern counterpart, and one in which Antonys

men have much less far to go than Xenophons (less than a seventh as far, in

fact).

Here that may be no more than a suggestion of Antonys humiliation

or perhaps rather of his humility, as whatever its length the retreat has still

shown him and his men at their Xenophontic best (esp. Ant. ). Elsewhere

intertextuality can become more charged and more thought-provoking, and

in particular it can be a tool for bringing out how, and how far, a world has

changed. To take a simple and familiar example, the Catilinarian introduc-

tion of Sejanus at the beginning of Annals can suggest that plotters hap-

pened in the principate and threatened the state just as they had done in the

Republic; but when a mark of the threat is the way that repente turbare fortuna

coepit, saeuire ipse aut saeuientibus uires praebere (in Woodmans translation, sud-

denly fortune started to turn disruptive and the man himself savageor to

present control to savages, Ann. ..) it is the difference as well as the simi-

larity to Sallusts saeuire fortuna ac miscere coepit fortuna (fortune started to be

savage and bring everything into confusion, Cat. .) that is striking. It is

ipse rather than ipsa: Tiberius own savagery has now taken fortunes place as

the disruptive force that acts in conjunction with the angry gods. And that is

a difference that the principate has made.

IV

Those two points from the Antony example often go together. When Diony-

sius of Phocaea cries out that everything now stands on a razors edge, men

Christopher Pelling

of Ionia, whether we are to be free or slaves, and runaway slaves as that

(Hdt. ..), the echo of the Doloneia is surely felt (Il. .); Dionysius

is trying to do what the Stoa Poikile would do for Marathon in art and what

Simonides would do for Plataea in literature, elevating the struggle against

the Persians to the same level as the Trojan War. Whether or not he is to be

a Nestor, his hearers are called upon to be heroes. But if so, the difference is

also felt. First there is the twist to make this, not a matter of life and death as

in the Iliad, but something that matters even more, that between freedom

and slavery. Secondly there is the extremely poor show that the Ionians

proceed to put on: the world has indeed changed, and such inspirational

rhetoric is not enough to produce heroism any more. Or rather not yet. This

is one of the ways in which the Ionian Revolt acts as a pre-play for the far

more successful freedom fighting a few years later: there will be ways then in

which such talk does succeed where Dionysius had failed. Change can go

both ways, and change for the better is here plotted intratextually just as

change for the worse was plotted intertextually in Dionysius epic echoing.

That may convey a compliment to the Greeks of and , more

freedom-conscious and more susceptible to inspiration than their Ionian

cousins; this would not be the only time in Herodotus where the Ionians suf-

fered in such comparisons. But it also has the further effect of reminding us

what a close-run thing it was, how very easily events in either or

could have fallen back into that Ionian pattern. The Greeks win through,

but only just; and that only-just-ness matters almost as much as the victory.

Or take Leonidas. Herodotus account of Thermopylae is especially rich

in Homeric echoes, and Herodotus Leonidas himself catches the tone:

when he hears the terms of the crucial oracle, he knows that , (if he stayed there, great glory would be left for him, and the prosperity of Sparta

would not be wiped out, ..). The resonant echo of the proem is clear,

and so are the Homeric terms in which he is thinking: the concern is eternal

fame (), that fame whichas the recall of the proem suggestsHerodotus own history will give Leonidas just as surely as the Iliad will give

its Helen the role she seeks as an eternal object of song (Il. .). The

writer and the character are both carving out the Homeric role, and the

Persian Wars are again, Stoa Poikile-like, being elevated to the same level as

the fighting around Troy. But it is with a difference: yes, glory for him in that passage, but a few sentences later the concern is to lay down

the of the Spartans alone (..)not just glory for one, then, but

That is the point I stressed in Pelling () .

Pelling () .


for three hundred, and indeed for the whole city. The whole Thermopylae

narrative can be read as conveying a meditation on glory and heroism in the

Trojan War past and in the narrative present: the play of individual and

collective, the decidedly unheroic attitude of some of the allies, the need for

self-sacrifice, the way that wrath is now exercised by the collective against

the unsatisfactory individual rather than the other way round. And yet, on

reflection, much of that was already there in the Iliad himself, in some form;

and the important thing is that heroism is still possible, that Leonidas can

still win that that matters so much. Marathon offers something of the same. The Homeric tinges are just as

plain. By the late afternoon of the battle attention is turning to the harrying

of the fleeing Persians (Hdt. ., tr. de Slincourt):

Here again they [the Athenians, or perhaps the Athenians and

Plataeans] were triumphant, chasing the routed enemy, and cutting

them down until they came to the sea, and men were calling for fire

and taking hold of () the ships. It was in this phase of the struggle that the War Archon Callimachus was killed, fighting

bravely [lit. having become, or having behaved as, a good man], and

also Stesilaus, the son of Thrasylaus, one of the generals; Cynegirus,

too, the son of Euphorion, had his hand cut off with an axe as he was

getting hold of a ships stern ( ), and so lost his life, together with many other well-known Athenians.

Where could this fire come from? A. R. Burn once conjured up a picture of

camp-followers running behind the battle with braziers; not very plausible.

Nor is there any mention of fire in our descriptions of the Marathon scene in

the Stoa Poikile. No; that fire comes, not from the Greek camp, but from the

Iliad: from the end of Book , when Hector is leading the charge upon the

Greek ships (Il. ., tr. Hammond):

, ,

Hektor would not let go of the ship where he had grasped it at the

stern, gripping the poop-end in his hands, and he called out to the

Trojans: Bring fire, and raise the war-cry all together

That is how I read it in Pelling () .

Burn () .

Christopher Pelling

Nor is it just the fire that evokes the Iliad. Hector too grasps a ship just as

the Greeks do now (notice the repeated ); Hector too will not let go, just as Cynegirus will not let go. And what both Hector and

Cynegirus grasp is the , or several of them in Herodotus odd plu-ral: a very rare word indeed, translated by LSJ as curved poop of the ship

and by Janko as a carved stern-post. Outside these two passages it only

crops up in passages that are surely evoking the Iliad, just as this must be.

And this, of course, is the crucial moment of both poem and war, the height

of Hectors achievementand yet the act that also begins the movement

that will bring Achilles back to the fighting, sealing Hectors own death and

the fate of Troy. So in the Iliad it is glory, but glory that presages disaster

and annihilation; just as Marathon could so easily have done had events

gone differently ten years later.

They did not, and the glory remained unqualified. Yet still one senses

the differing texture of this modern glory. Let us have a look at the speech of

Miltiades to Callimachus. The generals are split, and the vote of the pole-

march becomes crucial; Miltiades is trying to win Callimachus to his side,

and his rhetoric there has something of the same ring as Dionysius before

Lade (Hdt. .., tr. de Slincourt):

It is now in your hands, Callimachus, he said, either to enslave Ath-

ens, or to make her free and to leave behind you for all future genera-

tions a memory more glorious than even Harmodius and Aristogeiton

left. Never in our history have we Athenians been in such peril as

now. If we submit to the Persians, Hippias will be restored to power

and there is little doubt what misery must then ensue: but if we fight

and win, then this city of ours may well grow to pre-eminence

amongst all the cities of Greece. If you ask me how this can be, and

how the decision rests with you, I will tell you: we commanders are

ten in number, and we are not agreed upon what action to take; half

of us are for a battle, half against it. If we refuse to fight, I have little

doubt that the result will be bitter dissension; our purpose will be

shaken, and we shall submit to Persia. But if we fight before the rot

can show itself in any of us, then, if God gives us fair play, we can not

only fight but win. Yours is the decision; all hangs upon you; vote on

my side, and our country will be freeyes, and the first city of

This is weakened unduly in Waterfields translation, began to take over the ships.

Janko () .

Especially Ap. Rhod. Arg. . and Lyc. Alex. and .


Greece. But if you support those who have voted against fighting, that

happiness will be denied youyou will get the opposite.

As with Leonidas, there are echoes of the proem: Miltiades encourages Cal-

limachus to aspire to the sort of memorial that Herodotus history will in-

deed give him. Yet the rhetoric is not what we might expect, and not exactly

glorious. There is talk of freedom, but in a form that, jarringly at least to

modern tastes, dwells particularly on the power that Athens may hope to get

from it all, becoming the first city of Greece. There are no funeral-speech-

style fine words about Athens as the champions of Greece who set an exam-

ple to others, the confidence to be had in autochthons fighting for their own

land, the trust that the gods are on their side (as there will be at ..): , that is allthe gods dispensing things equally, and even that has an air of the conditional about it, as in de Slincourts transla-

tion, if God gives us fair play. There may well be gods around, but that is

not the way Miltiades is thinking or talking. No we will never surrender:

that sort of finest-hour rhetoric too is left for the end of Book , where its in-

terpretation is anything but straightforward. The argument is simply that

there is so much danger of stasis that any sort of delay may shake the Athe-

nian resolve so that they may Medise; something rotten may set in, some-

thing Stein and Nenci may be right in sensing nautical jargon for this rotting ship of state.

The argument makes sense: true or false, the cur-

rency which Herodotus attests for the Alcmaeonid-shield story shows that

there was indeed stasis in the air; and earlier in the book Herodotus himself

has described a refusal to Medise as folly, (.)glorious, wonderful folly, no doubt, but folly nonetheless.

Still, the argument is not very glorious, even if the upshot is. It is cer-

tainly a different world from that of the Iliad: no hint here of the fine words

of Odysseus at Iliad ., for instance, though admittedly that is not the

only attitude to flight-or-fight in the Iliad; certainly nothing so uplifting as

Sarpedons classic speech at Iliad .. But it introduces a theme that is

going to be strong in the next two books. Remember why Athens is the sav-

iour of Greece at .: no beacon-of-freedom rhetoric on the city as an in-

spiration to others, and nothingperhaps pointedlyto do with what they

did in : they just did not run away or Medise in when so many other

cities did. Remember too what weighs with Themistocles before Salamis:

the way Mnesiphilus convinced Themistocles, and in his turn Themistocles

Notice the epiphany of Pan to Pheidippides (.), the further hint of an epiph-

any with the monstrous figure who looms over Epizelus (), and it is surely not coinci-

dence that the action moves from one sacred area of Heracles to another (., .).

Stein () and Nenci () ad loc.

Christopher Pelling

convinced Eurybiades, was by stressing that if they withdrew to the Pelo-

ponnese too many of those other cities would run away, (.., cf. .). The famous advance of the Greeks at Marathonrunning into battle (..)is so close to presaging a very different sort of

running later on. It could so easily have happened that way, and everyone

knew it; this could indeed have been the Iliad over again, with the height of

glory starting the movement that led to total disaster. What eventually per-

suaded the Greeks to fight at Salamis was Themistocles threat that the

Athenians would sail away to Siris and leave the rest of the Greeks to their

fate (..); what persuaded Xerxes to fight was Sicinnus message (..),

which in its blend of truth and falsity had the news that the Greeks were

thinking of running away () and that Themistocles was really on the Persian side. All these claims were effective precisely because they were

wholly plausible.

We are left, then, with a paradox of freedom. The positive aspects, that

inspirational aspect that was initially so stressed at ., are not forgotten;

perhaps indeed they are taken for granted. But there are also negative as-

pects to that individualism, with everyone acting for themselves in the way

that . heraldedthe perpetual danger that states may be torn apart by

stasis as everyone pursues their own interests and vendettas; the perpetual

danger that the self-interest of particular cities may fragment an alliance.

And at these crucial moments it is the worst aspects of freedom, not the best,

that prove the key to Greeces triumphthat danger of stasis that drives

Athens to fight and win at Marathon; that fear of fragmentation that brings

on the battle of Salamis; that inter-city factionalism and self-interested

scheming that led Sparta to tell Plataea to turn to Athens (..), and that

would generate the war between Athens and Aegina that proved the salva-

tion of Greece by stimulating the Athenians to become sea-people (..).

Yet once againis that totally different from the world of the Iliad?

There would be no Iliad at all without its own inter-Greek squabbling, disaf-

fection, dissent, and distrust; Achilles too, not just Themistocles, can

threaten to sail away; there too it is the antagonism, mingled with a linger-

ing if battered comradeship, that eventually triggers the decisive step, with

Patroclus return leading eventually to Hectors own death and, at least

emblematically, to the sealing of Troys doom. This is an inter-city version,

of course, and we are firmly in the world of the polis. That much has

changed. But there are those elements of continuity as well as contrast, and

these are modern counterparts.

We are going to hear enough of those, too, in the next few books, strikingly often in

Spartan mouths: notice esp. . and ...


Most important, heroism was still possible, and the events of Marathon

proved it. Callimachus died having behaved as a good man, (., above, p. ). Epizelus is blinded when similarly behaving as a good man (.).

The Athenians fought (.): worthy of

note, worthy of being talked about, and worthy of Herodotus own as it grants them that eternal, epic memorial.

V

Consider another case: Xenophons turning of the liberation of the Cad-

meia ( BCE) into his own version of the Seven against Thebes. This has

been well handled by Schmitzer, who brought out the differences from the

rest of the tradition: not twelve returners, as in Plutarch, but seven; no men-

tion of Pelopidas and the important dimension of the plotters within the city.

Schmitzer also identified a further intertextual perspective, with the close

similarities of this sequence to that at the court of Alexander of Macedon at

Herodotus .. Here too we have the drunken alien tyrant-figures (in

Herodotus they numberedseven), the promise of (in Xenophon) the most

respectable and beautiful women in town (though the Spartans casually say

bring on the hetairai, ..), and then the discovery that the women are

rather less female and biddable than they expect. Schmitzers interest was to

bring out the highly dramatic texture of the sequence, and that point is well

taken. He was right to observe the effective use of dialogue as well as such

distinctively theatrical features as the hammering on the door (..). That

suggests we would be right here to think, not just of the myth itself, but of its

theatrical presentation in plays (not just Aeschylus play, of course).

Here too one can go further, and think about the intertextual sugges-

tions for what they tell us about change and continuity. The Herodotean

echo casts the Spartans as the new Persians, bullying, insensitive, and auto-

cratic; we are used to discussing how Herodotus himself and Thucydides

cast fifth-century Athens as the new Persia, a world where one could talk of

Atticising as the new Medising, and this is not the only passage where

Xenophon does something of the same. We should also remember what

comes next in Xenophons account (Hell. ..):

And in this modern world such locutions are particularly frequent when people show themselves good men in fighting, and often dying, for freedom: cf. ..,

.., .. (Leonidas), .., and .. (but also .. on the Persian side).

Schmitzer ().

Christopher Pelling

The Thebans were now afraid themselves of what would happen if

they were the only ones to be at war with Sparta, and so they hit on

the following trick. They persuaded the Spartan harmost at Thespiae,

Sphodriasbribery was suspectedto invade Attica; the aim was to

bring about a war between Athens and Sparta

And Sphodrias duly invades, very hamhandedly; and war ensues. We there-

fore also have a counterpart of the next phase of the Seven story, with Ath-

ens deciding that it is time to intervene in what was originally someone elses

quarrel. But there is no question here of Athens measuring the rights and

wrongs of this case of other peoples quarrelling: none of those fine words so

familiar from tragedy about the citys traditional role in defending the weak

and the oppressed, or in upholding what the gods demand. In fact their feet

are initially so cold that they punish the two generals who were involved in

the liberation itself (..). When their involvement comes, it is a straight-

forward response to aggression; they get involved in other peoples quarrel

because it is no longer simply other peoples: they have been attacked, and

they must retaliate (..). The world has indeed changed, with self-interest

and revenge taking the place of altruism, and in this new world the other in-

tertextual model, that of a sequence of empires where Xenophons Sparta is

replaying Herodotus Persia, is the one that dominates.

Yet it has not changed completely. The sequence begins with an unusu-

ally strong statement of the role of the gods (Hell. ..):

There are many other instances one could quote, both Greek and

barbarian, to show that the gods do not overlook those who are impi-

ous or do unholy things: now I will tell the tale. The Spartans who

swore that they would respect the cities autonomy but then occupied

the Theban acropolis were punished by the very people they had

wronged, when no-one had ever defeated them before; and the local

citizens who had brought them to the acropolis and wanted to enslave

the city to the Spartans in order to get tyrannical power for them-

selves had their rule destroyed. A mere seven of the exiles were

enough to bring this about. I will tell how it happened.

There is a strong whiff of Herodotus about that too, not least in the both

Greek and barbarian (Hdt. praef.), the strong statement of divine justice

(Hdt. .., .), and perhaps even the authorial first-person. But that

hint of a divine role is not just Herodotean, it too recalls the world of trag-

edy and of the Seven against Thebes. Here too impiety and transgression is

punished, even if in less direct a way than (say) Capaneus being smitten as

he broaches the battlements (Soph. Ant. ). The punishment of tyranni-


cal aspirations does not merely affect the local Thebans but also presages the

fate of the whole Spartan empire. Its excesses are seen in Cleombrotus

mindless brutality in response to the liberation (..), and it is no coin-

cidence that the end of the panel has a mention of Leuctra (..), clearly

relying on an audiences full awareness of what is going to happen next.

Various Spartan reversals and Theban successes (esp. .) are also shap-

ing the narrative in an unmistakable direction. There are certain rhythms

that reassert themselves even in a modern world, rhythms of divine in-

volvement to punish tyrannical excess, rhythms of the rise and fall of em-

pires, and there is both continuity and change.

Nor are we done with the Seven yet. Leuctra comes and goes; Thebes is

the master now. What are the Athenians to do? At ..- Procles of

Phlius urges them to support Sparta against their traditional enemies. The

same intertextual flavouring recurs. What would happen if the barbarian

were to attack again? Would it not be Sparta you would trust in a new

Thermopylae (..)? And remember your distant ancestors who would

not allow the Argives who died at the Cadmeiathe phrasing accentuates

the similarity between the Seven and the liberationto remain unbur-

ied; remember too how those ancestors sprang to the defence of the Hera-

clidae; remember finally how the Spartans saved your city at the end of the

Peloponnesian War when the Thebans sought to destroy it (..). So,

just as in the Stoa Poikile, the continuity of mythical and historical is as-

serted; the Athenians are called upon to play their heroic role again. This of

course is the stuff of funeral speeches too, material that the Athenians (and

Xenophons audience too) had heard so often beforethough rarely in a

plea to rush to the aid of Sparta, and that paradox too is surely felt. Now the

more worldweary and informed reader might well wonder how realistic all

Procles rhetoric would be in this modern world, especially all his confident

references to the good-hearted and reliable Spartans; a reader has only to

think back to the Cadmeia and to Sphodrias to feel some doubts, and if they

thought back further to Thucydides they would feel stronger doubts still. But

Procles wins, whether or not the Athenians motives were now quite so high-

minded: opposition speakers are shouted down, and Iphicrates is des-

patched. Several circles and reverses have now been completed, and yet a

further paradox is that everything has settled down to fill the traditional

mythical pattern after all. Athens does find itself moving proudly against

Thebes and smacking down this new wave of tyrants, just as the funeral-

speech rhetoric loved to recall; and just as they had defended the Heracli-

dae, so now they defend the children of the children of Heracles, their Spar-

tan descendants.

So the old narrative code has reasserted itself after all, once the pieces of

the jigsaw had rearranged themselves in some unexpected configurations

Christopher Pelling

along the way; the intertextuality has helped the reader to plot the pattern-

ing as it happened, giving some shape to the bewildering flow of events. Still,

of course no intertextuality can quite control the reader, and there are differ-

ent further moves that different readers might make. Some might respond

by feeling that some sort of order has been re-established, with tyranny and

imperialism cast down yet again and Athens in the right place (triumphant

and freedom-fighting, though evidently not every reader would have shared

those Athenian complacencies; Xenophon would not have shared them

himself). Some might even have believed Procles, and looked forward to the

sunny uplands of a future where Thebes would know its place and the hon-

ourable Spartans would repay the debt of gratitude they should owe. Yet

some might reflect rather on the self-interested and pragmatic motives that

had driven events back to that pattern, and thought of how and why the

code had re-established itself. And, if they thought of the Heraclidae and

the funeral-speech tropes, they might also recollect another twist found in

tragedy itselfto dwell on, precisely, the gratitude that the Heraclidae and

their descendants should owe to Athens, with the rombustiously clodhop-

ping implication that the gratitude had been notable for its absence (Eur.

Hcld. ). Can any more gratitude be expected of the Spartans now? Or

is that just part of the instability and unpredictability that the end of the Hel-

lenica marks as characterising the even newer world after Mantinea (..),

with no patterns and no new rising-or-falling empire to be seen? (Or not

yet!but it will not take long ) All one can say is that intertextuality might

still be thought-provoking, not just in identifying a reassuring narrative code

but also in intimating some further, less reassuring questions that the pat-

terning might generate.

VI

So far this paper has been dealing with narrative models; let me return to

Plutarch at the end to suggest how a philosophical model, Plato, might also

affect the reading of a narrative, once again by providing a template and

once again with differences that are as telling as similarities. In particular,

Platonic political philosophy can be a powerful analytic tool, affording a

repertoire of, and for, historical evaluation. Take the analysis of the cycle of

constitutions in Republic . Echoes of this are heard at the end of Caesar,

where the resonant phrase marking the inception of Caesars monarchy

This was acknowledged tyranny: he already enjoyed a monarchs unac-

This section previewed some material that is now set out more fully in Pelling ()

, , , , and .


countability, and now he had a monarchs permanence as well (Caes. .)

echoes the acknowledged tyranny that at Republic b marks the end of

the cycle when the demagogue emerges as tyrant (cd). In one way

that suits Caesar, for his demagogic techniques have been traced throughout

the Life (., ., ., ., .). The internal disorder that typified

Platos unruly democracy (eb) also fits the evil state of politics (ka-

kopoliteia) that Plutarch has traced at Caes. , and this picks up an insight of

Greek theorising that goes well beyond Plato: if anyone thinks that a king or

a tyrant comes about from any other cause but lawlessness and greed, that

person is a fool (Anonymus Iamblichi .). Still, by now the picture has

become complicated, and it is more interesting to note the ways that Caesar

does not fit the traditional stereotype. Platos demagogue does not shrink

from bloodshed (e) and ruthlessly eliminates anyone who is a threat

(bc); but Caesar practises clemency (.), even giving honours to old

adversaries (.), and fails to move against Brutus and Cassius despite his

suspicions (.). Platos tyrant protects himself with a bodyguard (b,

de); Caesar refuses one (.). Platos tyrant behaves well in his first days

in power, smiling and greeting everyone he meets and pretending to be

benign and gentle to everyone (de). Caesars gentleness (.)praots

again, the same word as in Platogoes deeper, and he knows that popular

goodwill is a better way to protect ones power (.). The whole point, then,

is that Caesar is not the conventional Platonic tyrant, and so far that would

seem to be in line with a principle that Plutarch sometimes makes explicit,

the need to be as generous as truth will allow in treating a historical figure

(Cimon .; the idea is developed more elaborately in On Herodotus Malice

bd).

Yet it is not just a question of being nice. For all Caesars own good be-

haviour in power (not unrelieved, but still emphasised) and for all his aware-

ness of the danger (esp. ), the telling point is that Caesar is still doomed,

and the Platonic outcome reasserts itself after all. Perhaps that is because the

pattern is more universal still than Plato suggested. Just as Herodotus vari-

ous Eastern tyrants replicate a similar pattern of behaviour and overstretch

despite all their differences in individual character, so here the insightful and

careful tyrant may be falling into the same pattern as the more predictable

rash and transgressive counterpart; that is an even bigger and bolder thesis

about tyranny and its typical trajectory, something about what tyranny itself

imposes rather than about the multifarious figures who become tyrants. Or

perhaps the reasons here are more specific, Caesar-shaped rather than tyr-

anny-shaped. His army, his friends, and his popular support have carried

him to power; now all three are turning against him (Caes. ), with the ex-

Cf. also Arist. Pol. ba, b.

Christopher Pelling

cesses of friends and the unruliness of troops disaffecting the people too.

Whatever he does, he is trappedtrapped by his own past. The narrative

code that he falls into is not simply one that readers sense, it is one that is

seen coming by Caesar himself. We earlier saw cases where awareness of

historiographic models led figures in a text to role-play, yet here Caesar is

desperate not to role-play, to distance himself from the model. But here too

the pressure of events is too great, and the Platonic cycle relentlessly turns.

VII

In case after case, then, we have seen two different types of dialogue: a dia-

logue of an author with a predecessor, summoning up a past storyline to il-

luminate a present one; and a dialogue of two voices within that same mod-

elling, one of continuity and one of change. We should not lose hold of those

initial points about plausibility. The classic target texts carry such authority

that one can certainly be more persuaded, not merely about the accuracy of

a particular item, but also of the credibility of a storyline if it fits into a famil-

iar pattern: those narrative codes, once again. But the changes matter too,

and the narrative codes themselves can be put up for analysis. If the story of

the Seven comes back in a different world and with different motives, or if

Caesar falls into a Platonic pattern for very unPlatonic reasons, why should

that be? Those are fundamentally interpretative questions, and the defamil-

iarisation of the intertextual templates plays just as important a role in

prompting them as the familiarity of the patterns we see.

Once again, not much of this is confined to historiography. The ques-

tions one might ask about the heroism of Aeneas against a Homeric tem-

plate might move through something of the same terrain, again asking how

much of the world has changedand not excluding the possibility that

some of the tensions visible in the Aeneid, including that between individual

glory-hunting and collective civic duty, may have been there already in the

Homeric poems themselves, just as Herodotus Leonidas may be reflecting a

fraught balance between individual and collective that is present in the Iliad.

Perhaps, in searching for that distinctive quiddity of historiographic intertex-

tuality, we have still only rephrased it in terms that reflect the different ways

we care about real life.

Or perhaps that too needs to be put differently, by saying that other

genres also deal with real life, but in a filtered transposition. If the Aeneid is

exploring and rephrasing heroism, or if Ovid is developing a different tem-

plate for what a girl (he hopes) might look for in a man, or if Euripides

Medea makes an audience think differently about familiar ideas of woman-

hood, those genres too are prompting thoughts not just about literature as a


hermetic complex but also of literature as it draws and tells upon life. Of

course the reflection of life is not one-to-one, either in the sense of literal

truth or even of precise verisimilitude; the filtering is complex. But litera-

tureat least narrative literature, but surely more than thatpresents in

some sense , even if not (Arist. Poet. a); and the intertextual moves that readers make in historiography about what

happened are closely analogous to those that they make in weighing poten-

tial happenings in other genresin thinking what they would believe and

would make of such things if they were to be a real-life counterpart, or as close

to a counterpart as the genre might allow. Once again, we see that sense in

which non-historiographic intertextuality can be parasitic on its histo-

riographic counterpart, or at least (given that other genres doubtless got

there first) on the reflectiveness about real experience which was then to sur-

face in historiography in its clearest form.

So, at least in these respects, historiographic intertextuality need not be

different from intertextuality in other genres, even if it is used more directly

and less obliquely for real-life events and we therefore care about our infer-

ences in a different way. It is not deviant; it is foundational.

CHRISTOPHER PELLING

Christ Church, Oxford [email protected]

Christopher Pelling

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Intertextuality, Plausibility, and Interpretation